Despite the increasing options for digital communication, such as instant messaging and social media, email communication remains the leading form of business communication. Worldwide, over 200 billion emails are sent on an average day. Many of these emails include requests for the email recipient to carry out a particular task. The process of identifying actionable requests and tracking them to completion is still a manual task that takes time and is prone to errors, lowering the recipient's overall efficiency
When a user receives an email, they must first decide whether to read the email, and after reading the entire email, determine whether any portion of the email requires a response or other action. The user can then either provide the response or action immediately or plan to provide it at a later time. In the latter case, the user must either rely on their memory to remember to complete the task, or manually track the task by, for example, writing it down, inputting it into a calendar, or flagging the email. But even then, the user will need to revisit their mechanism for manually tracking the task in order to remind themselves of what remains to be done, by searching through emails or locating to-do lists, for example. Additionally, the user must manually cease tracking tasks as they are completed. The result of these systems is that users are slower to complete some tasks and can easily forget to complete other tasks.
For at least these reasons, a need exists for systems and methods that assist an email recipient in identifying actionable requests in emails as they are received and tracking those requests efficiently. More specifically, a need exists for systems and methods that can present actionable portions of emails on a graphical user interface (“GUI”) for a user in a manner that increases the user's efficiency and provides the user with easily shortcuts for tracking, organizing, and managing actionable requests that are still pending.